Archive for June, 2009

Free Antivirus from Microsoft: Can We Trust It?

For those who haven’t heard, Microsoft has decided to discontinue its OneCare product and release its own free antivirus. This concept of a Microsoft antivirus really has me baffled. I don’t understand why anyone would use an antivirus for Windows made by Microsoft. I especially don’t understand why anyone would pay for it, for sure. No matter how its spun by the marketing department, I just can’t believe the horrid logic happening here. Why in the world would I trust the same company that couldn’t protect the operating system to begin with to build my antivirus software? It makes no sense. I’m not even going to touch on the anticompetitive suits that will inevitably come out of this situation.

What would be an acceptable change? Why don’t we take the things learned by developing this antivirus and build them into the operating system to stop the attack before it happens instead of trying to detect and stop an attack while it’s happening. Okay, I understand that it’s slightly more complicated than that. But seriously? An antivirus for an operating system made by the same company as the operating system? Ugh. Next I think I’m going to take out an insurance policy against my insurance policy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 17th, 2009

If Search Is Broken, How Has Bing Fixed It?

I really don’t mean to be one of those nay-saying Microsoft haters. Really, I don’t. But I’m still looking for that feature that Bing offers me that Google doesn’t (except of course for the cool images on the homepage). Is it the shopping? I think not. My new wife and I recently purchased a Samsung plasma tv. I decided to take Bing for a test run to see if it helped me make the decision.

First, I did a search in Google’s shopping section. We decided on the Samsung PN50A550. The model has been discontinued and the price was right at a local shop here in town. What I found was actually a bit surprising. My search on Google returned a nice little price range as well as some reviews, some technical specs, and some other related items I might be interested in.
samsung-a550-google

And Bing? Well.. it returns nothing. That’s right, I was brought to a page with two HDMI cables. No prices, no reviews, nothing.
samsung-a550-bing

Well, since my tv shopping resulted in a complete failure, I decided to check out the travel feature. Like I said earlier, I have a new wife and we just got back from our honeymoon just a few weeks ago. We decided to go to Daytona Beach. Bing hadn’t been launched yet when we were planning the trip, but I decided to go to Bing to see what the hotel selection was like.

Bing’s hotel selection was actually pretty good when going through the travel section of Bing’s site. It let me pick which features I was looking for and found the best prices. It acted much like any big travel site that you’d find around the web — pick your dates and location and it spits out the best prices. What was interesting to me was that typing “daytona beach hotels” into the search bar didn’t bring up the same interface. In fact, I couldn’t distinguish their search results from Google’s except that Google showed the suggested similar search terms at the bottom except on the top like Bing. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the cheapest hotel, so it was a great feature that I could select the features that I needed on the side.

So how did Bing work for me? Well, in shopping for my tv, it was a complete and utter failure. Google clearly took the upper hand since.. well it returned results. For the hotels, Bing clearly dominated Google – as long as I knew where to go in the interface (except, one could argue that if I knew where to go in the first place I wouldn’t need to search). In my case, Bing really was a fancy new interface for a travel site like Travelocity or some other similar site. Even then, it was an improvement. But is Bing really fixing search? I would argue not. It’s an improvement on shopping, probably. A fix for search? Well I’m not so sure it’s broken, but I honestly can’t see a difference except for the interface is slightly rearranged.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 16th, 2009

Why IT People Become Jerks

It seems that IT and technical support staffers are constantly at war with end users and other branches of their companies. I’ve read several articles and best practices on how to deal with end users in the past. Heck, I even wrote a blog entry with tips for how tech support people can deal with end users more effectively. Inspired by a discussion on Slashdot, I decided to compile a list of things to keep in mind when dealing with your IT staff. None of these are in any way attacks on certain people or certain situations. They’re merely observations of frustrations that I’ve experienced time and time again.

Just because I’m not panicing, that doesn’t mean I don’t care. As a system or network admin, we deal with far more emergencies than you probably realize. Just because there’s not panic or urgency in my voice doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of the urgency of any given situation. I may also not work on your specific issue the moment that you report it. I may have higher priority issues that have to be dealt with first. Another thing to keep in mind is that the squeaky wheel gets the oil. Don’t abuse this principle or you’ll make things worse, but check in with me once in a while.

Don’t ask me general questions and expect anything different than general answers. Questions like “My Outlook doesn’t work, what is causing that?” Could be answered by any answer ranging from “your network cable is unplugged” to “Outlook is misconfigured” to “the datacenter is on fire”. Often this can be one of the biggest frustrations as the IT staff really have no road to run on but are expected to produce results.

Expect technical answers to technical questions. If you ask me about something technical but don’t really care, get ready to be bored out of your skull. All too often I get asked very technical questions and then get called a ‘nerd’ because I give some long explanation. I’m just trying to answer your question.

Don’t use terms you don’t understand. This is probably one of the most frustrating things for me personally working with non-technical people. Trying to look smart by using fancy words will only either 1) make you look like an idiot and waste both of our time, or (2 it will make me spend time coming up with a politically correct way of calling you an idiot. Seriously, this is bad for both of us. I’m not going to think less of you because you’re not technical. That’s not your job. It’s my job. But please don’t waste our time by pretending to know something that you don’t.

Solving problems requires time and testing. I can’t just make changes willy-nilly without testing or this giant pendulum of frustration will swing back the other way in the form of more problems caused by the changes I made. Making adjustments to systems can often cause other problems that I didn’t anticipate, let alone the non-technical user. I can’t tell you enough how important proper testing is to my sanity.

End users lie. Whether they intended to or not, they lie. This can go back to the correct terminology point, but some end users will knowingly lie to technical support people to get what they want. If I don’t believe you that something very unlikely to happen does happen, don’t be offended. I’ve been lied to enough times to make me suspicious of anything out of the ordinary.

I don’t need emotion, I need error messages. This may be more of a guy thing than a quirk about IT personnel, but when a user describes a problem to me is not “I wonder how it felt that the mail server rejected my message”. My initial thought is going to be “I wonder what’s causing that”. Please forgive me if my initial response is immediately a question rather than listening. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that you’ve piqued my interest and hurled me straight into problem-solving mode.

While not every “techie” is this same way, these are some great perspectives to keep in mind while dealing with your IT staff. Our minds often work very differently than those who don’t care about technology. If we can each understand why the other is the way they are, we can mitigate the notorious tension between the end user and support personnel. What about you? Are you a jerk IT person? If so, how can we avoid making you the way you are? Have you learned anything on how to deal with people from technical support?

Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jun 11th, 2009

Linux Distros Have Had ‘App Stores’ For Years

It appear that the next company to join the ‘App Store’ bandwagon will be Novell. According to PCPro, they’re considering launching an App Store for netbooks, much like vendors have been doing in Apple’s footsteps for the mobile phone market. The App Store would be in the openSUSE version of Moblin and would essentially allow users to install open source applications with a few clicks on their netbooks. One of the things that they’re depending upon to attract users to the platform and store is the fact that its applications are available for free.

What I find completely ridiculous about this whole thing is that it just might work. Linux users (including openSUSE users) have had repository after repository open for them to use for years. openSUSE (or Ubuntu, Red Hat, take your pick..) have had the ability to have these few-click installs for their users this whole time but most people don’t know what a repository is.

Novell VP of Business Development Holger Dyroff told us that “it’s also a method of educating people about the benefits of open source”. I don’t think this will work for educating people about open source, however. People will learn that “open source app store” means free as in price and not care about free as in freedom. Good or bad, this idea of an app store does seem to have brought this idea of repositories of software to be installed to the masses.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 9th, 2009

Is Microsoft Against the Same Thing Linux Is Against in the Desktop Market?

Microsoft’s new interface to Live Search, called Bing, seems to be taking off nicely for them. Their ad campaign has created quite a stir and they snagged a pretty good chunk of the search market share within the first few days of its launch. Computerworld reports that Bing accounted for roughly 16% of the search market share in the U.S. with Google accounting for 71% and Yahoo coming in with 10%. Globally, Google controls a much larger share of the market space with over 87% with both Microsoft and Yahoo bringing in barely over 5%.

The question is, can Bing hold up in the long run? Microsoft has been pouring money into advertising and creating hype around Bing so the launch better show some serious results. We’ve already seen an amount of money that Microsoft is willing to throw at the search market in its $40 billion offer to buyout Yahoo!, so I’m sure that this barrage on Google will keep up for a long time, but how much of the search activity is real and how much is because Bing is new? Personally, I used Bing for a day or two while it was new to see what it was like. However, except for the search suggestions at the side, Bing really had nothing to offer me and I went back to Google.

Just like Linux distributions trying to get into the desktop market, users tend to stick with what they are comfortable with. Yes, I’m a Linux fan and do think that Linux offers a superior product. I don’t necessarily think that this is the same case for Bing in the search market, but this is a problem that Bing is going to face. After trying out Bing and finding that it wasn’t as drastically different than Microsoft said it was going to be, I went back. Why? Because I’m comfortable with Google. I like Google’s interface better. Does Google have a better product? Perhaps. Just like when people hear ‘PC’ they think ‘Windows’, when people hear ‘search’ they think ‘Google’.

Of course, only time will tell but I wouldn’t expect to see this influx of market share for long for Bing. It’s going to be a long road to success for Microsoft if they want to take the search market. For now we can expect big things as its Ballmer’s pet project and seems to have a nearly infinite amount of resources. As time goes on, Bing will need to be able to sustain itself to be a viable product so Microsoft can devote those resources to R&D to add value to the user experience rather than using it to create hype.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 9th, 2009

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